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Frazar Henry, Composer/Pianist
Recent Works:
Fracture
for chamber orchestra
Fracture is based on an electronic experiment I performed on a short theme. I started with a sine wave playing the motif slowly and gradually sped it up until the theme was repeating hundreds of times a second. This produced complex noises with many weird overtones, so I analyzed some of the sounds with a spectrograph and used them as a basis for the harmonic form of the piece. My composition begins with a statement of the original theme, and gradually introduces faster and faster elements along with some of the strange partials from the electronic process, until eventually it all coalesces into a representation of the harmonic series, the end result of my experiment.
It's just sounds?
for bassoon and two percussionists
My inspiration for It’s just sounds? came from my composition teacher Dorothy Hindman, who showed me an interview with John Cage from the documentary Listen (1992). I remember being inspired by it after watching it, but I didn’t really think much about it until about half a year later when writing this piece. I had the idea to compose something that made use of the natural music that is present in speech, and I couldn’t think of a better excerpt to use than this recording of John Cage. My piece starts out with a simple imitation of his voice in the bassoon, and gradually elements are taken away from it, starting with the words. The next element to go is pitch, which disappears when I transfer the melody to the snare drum. Finally, even the rhythm is removed and the piece becomes formless, leaving only background noise.
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